I did too, the first time I played. It felt artificial how closely it stalked me, almost felt reality breaking given the size of the Sevastopol and the number of other humans onboard - as if the alien had developed a Ripley homing ability like the shark in Jaws The Revenge.
To that end, and possibly to relieve stress on my heart, I’m playing on easy. I don’t normally do this but then again I do want to actually complete the game, so I’m compromising my standards a bit. We’ll see where that gets me.
I came close to beating it on normal, then my save file somehow got wiped and I later started again. Now I have a save game puttering around somewhere in the middle and I go back to it from time to time.
The gameplay is annoying at times, and the overall length bugged me when I was trying to power through it and write a review. But that atmosphere… jeez. Alien/Aliens, both of which I first saw on videotape around ‘87, were practically a religious experience for me, and this game just speaks to some primal shit in me. Everything from the staticky 20th century Fox logo, the eerie opening menu screen, the clunky CRTs in the offices, to the freakin’ anamorphically-distorted lens flares – they just killed the production design.
Eh. Colonial Marines was tried-and-true FPS stuff. But A:I was kinda-stealth (with a xenomorph that kinda knew where you were all the time), kinda 3rd-person shooty (particularly toward the end), and not particularly clever with any of it. I enjoyed running through it, though; once.
But the set design and atmosphere. OMG. Yes, definitely hit all the right buttons.
Yeah, that’s what’s simultaneously awesome and terrible about the game. I’m living one of the movies! But as somebody who saw Alien way too young and then successfully pleaded with my mom to take me to see Aliens at 14, well I guess I’m pretty much hard wired to react to this game. I’d be curious to know what my heart rate and blood pressure do when I fire this up.
One of my harshest criticisms of the game is that sometimes death felt so arbitrary that in certain stretches I had to just completely turn off my fear response to keep playing. Headphones off, grim death march to the next telephone, lather/rinse/repeat as many times as necessary. Which isn’t how a survival horror game is supposed to be played, obviously.
Played a bunch more over the weekend and I’m definitely enjoying it more on the lower difficulty, it just removes a bunch of frustrations I had with the game initially. Somenofthe levels just seem designed to thwart efforts to accomplish objectives without running afoul of the alien, or androids or other people. I replayed sections of the level where you have to find a medkit for one of your crew so many times, but it was satisfying once I finally did get through, even if the factors for success or fail feel kind of random. I think I’m in good shape to push onward, I’m enjoying this.
Played a bit more last night and I had to actually go back and check my settings to be sure my game was still set to easy (actually novice, which is one step down from easy). I hit some fairly frustrating roadblocks on the tenth mission, the one where Ripley is asked to close off sections of the lab as she lures the alien through, in hopes of trapping it there. Had no trouble at all luring the xenomorph, dude was on me like stink on a pig. But several times I would have to retreat to a locker to wait on it to leave, then step out to progress only to see the alien come right back around the corner.
I’ve read up on the tips, the best course of action is to try to maintain steady, forward yet cautious motion. Staying in one place, hiding, seems to paradoxically draw the alien closer to you. And my experience seems to bear this out. But you can get stuck in a negative loop that way, if there aren’t decent options around to hide behind as you move forward.
I was kind of amused that they actually accounted for what would happen if a xenomorph and android crossed paths, I watched this happen a couple times from my hiding place. The android will stop and ask, “What are you?” and “logging contamination breach” while the alien will kind of quizzically regard the robot for a moment and just move on. I thought maybe the alien might attack the android, like what happened to Bishop at the end of Aliens. But I guess you could make the argument that, while they seem to have similarly organic innards, the Seegson models are much less lifelike than W-Y models. Or something.
So I’ve either gotten into the game’s groove or it’s getting easier or maybe a bit of both, but I’ve definitely been cranking along the past week or so. I’m actually a little surprised by my progress, but it’s assisted by the fact that you get moments of “downtime”, when you’re not being actively stalked. You’ll still come across the occasional person or android but they’re much easier to dodge and/or kill (though I’m trying not to kill any humans).
But I’m hitting another roadblock, and again it’s mostly psychological. At around the midpoint you’ll “defeat” the alien, though you know of course that you couldn’t have seen the last of it. That’s when you’ll hit a good couple missions of the downtime I mentioned. But I’ve hit the “return” of the alien and it’s very effective. Nothing you haven’t seen in any of the movies, though you could say that about the whole game. But it’s stressing me out, man!
I imagine this game is most effective for folks who were traumatized by Alien as children. It definitely pushes those buttons. But I agree with folks that it also kind of damages the xenomorph’ mystique - when you’ve seen it clomp out of a hole in the ceiling and walk right by your hiding spot and then disappear again, you can practically hear it saying “Where’d everybody go?” It definitely doesn’t feel like the sleek, unstoppable killing machine of the movies - more like a short tempered but seriously dumb animal. Which, who knows, may be more realistic.
A couple more missions in and I’ve hit a dramatic moment when Ripley makes what seems to me to be an odd choice. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that another character makes an emotional choice that actually seems logical enough, but Ripley opposes them. Which may seem needlessly coy for a 3 year old game, but I am nearing the climax (I think) and I wouldn’t really want to ruin that moment for anyone else. Guess I’ll just see how this plays out.
All right, so this will probably be my last post because - I did it. I beat Alien Isolation, finally knocking out a game that’s been troubling me since release. It was stressful, for reasons I’ve already covered, but I’m glad I did it. The experience was a good one, overall. But I don’t know that I can say that the game was a good one overall. Not really. Mainly, I just don’t think the experience they were trying to provide really worked. Not sure if that’s an inherent problem in attempting to bring the experience of the first movie to a game, or just the way they did it. But I do think this game kind of harms the mystique of the alien. You definitely feel that the alien is tethered to you, and will never be too far away even when you do manage to get by it. And, I’ll add, this is the case for the various android and human enemies you’ll encounter. If you sneak by them, they’ll just modify their patrol route to follow you, as if they subconsciously know where you are at all times but are trying to sportingly allow you the opportunity to keep avoiding them.
The scripted events work best. They really evoke the feeling of being stalked and trapped. There’s a really great “oh, I’m so screwed” moment at the end that really caught me by surprise. I also really enjoy these games that let you be a space engineer, like the Dead Space games do. It’s scratches that itch if you always wanted to be Montgomery Scott. And these guys made the environments so damned beautiful, in the sense that they look exactly like you’d think they should from the first movie. You’ll come across generators that have to be primed before being started, doors that have to be cut down with a blowtorch, monochromatic screens. It’s all low tech in the same way the movie was. I loved it.
So, thumbs up from me, for what it’s worth, but know what you’re getting into. I do think I made the right call dialing down the difficulty. I can’t imagine how bad it would have been any higher. I might never have climbed out of the lockers you could stash yourself in while you stare at the motion sensor and wait for it to stop beeping.
I was a big big fan of this game after going in skeptical. I loved the 80s GUI aesthetic so much, and the graphics were fantastic overall, plus super solid stealth mechanics and an excellent story. A nearly perfect licensed movie tie in game from my perspective.
